Life above water: small-scale fisheries as a human experience

“Life under water” is UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 14, under which small-scale fisheries fall. Yet, most of what is happening in small-scale fisheries, and certainly those things that are interesting to social scientists, are taking place above water—on the water and by the water. Small-scale fishers make their living off the fish that swims in the ocean, but they do so with the lives they construct for themselves and with others on land. Therefore, small-scale fishers depend on their communities as much as they depend on the fish, their boats, and gear. It is as members of communities that fishers acquire the knowledge, energy, motivation, and meaning they need to carry out their work. For fisheries social scientists, the community is a unit of analysis. However, fisheries communities are not isolated from what is happening outside them. Consequently, social scientists focus on forces at higher scales. Still, I argue that it is important that they do not lose sight of local communities, because if they do they also lose the sight of small-scale fisheries.